This paper argues that, to be forward-looking in a logically consistent sense, a decision maker must take account of his overall well-being, not just his instantaneous utility, in all future periods. However, such a decision-maker is necessarily time inconsistent. The paper explores the...

How can naivete about present bias persist despite experience? To answer this question, our experiment investigates participants' ability to learn from their own behavior. Participants decide how much to work on a real effort task on two predetermined dates. In the week preceding each work date,...

In this paper, we first recover the individual valuation of expected future fuel costs at the time of a car purchase and then explore how various factors relate to the recovered consumer undervaluation of fuel savings (on average, consumers' willingness-to-pay for a AC1 reduction in fuel costs...

Firms often set long notice periods when consumers cancel a contract, and sometimes do so even when the costs of changing or canceling the contract are small. We investigate a model in which a firm offers a contract to consumers who may procrastinate canceling it due to naive present-bias. We...

We repeatedly elicit beliefs about the returns to study effort in a panel survey of students of a large university course. A behavioral model of quasi-hyperbolic discounting and malleable beliefs yields the prediction that the dynamics of return beliefs mirrors the importance of exerting...

We design and implement a novel experimental test of subjective expected utility theory and its generalizations. Our experiments are implemented in the laboratory with a student population, and pushed out through a large-scale panel to a general sample of the US population. We find that a...

This paper explores the optimal provision of dynamic incentives for employees with reciprocal preferences. Building on the presumption that a relational contract can establish a norm of reciprocity, I show that generous upfront wages that activate an employee's reciprocal preferences are more...

This paper studies the relationship between patience and comparative development through a combination of reduced-form analyses and model estimations. Based on a globally representative dataset on time preference in 76 countries, we document two sets of stylized facts. First, patience is...

Reporting private information is a key part of economic decision making. A recent literature has found that many people have a preference for honest reporting, contrary to usual economic assumptions. In this paper, we investigate whether preferences for honesty are malleable and what determines...